Exactly. When I first found out about dmr, I really really hoped the stories will flood in here after the massive Steve Jobs amount. Not to take anything away from Steve, but dmr is far more important in my opinion, and I'm sure many other geeks would agree. I'm glad he isn't just quietly being forgotten like I feared he would.
I think Steve Jobs's passing away was a bigger shock to people because the memory of him and his accomplishments was/is very fresh in people's minds. He was the CEO of Apple till just over a month ago.
It's like finding out a friend passed away and "I just met him last week..."
Ah yes, the cognitive dissonance of an Apple fanboy developer who knows that C is far more important than anything SJ ever did yet can't reconcile that with their belief that SJ was god.
Shame on Hacker News's audience that the front page isn't filled up with Dennis stories right now.
There's no shame, there just aren't the same type of stories about Dennis. Ritchie was a hacker, he created amazing things that were ahead of their time which have enabled a great many developers to build amazing things (including essentially the entirety of the infrastructure of the internet and the web). But so much of Ritchie's work was enabling and mentoring rather than directing and guiding (which was more Jobs' MO). How many tens of thousands of developers were enabled to do amazing things by Unix or C? How many developers had moments of inspiration and enlightenment as reading through K&R enabled them to achieve a higher level of sophistication in their programming skills? But how many of those examples make for good storytelling?
A paintbrush is indeed far more important than the painting of Michel Angelo or da Vinci from an historical point of view.
On top of that, there are thousands of programming language today, many relying deeply on concepts and paradigms that are much younger than C itself, but C remains one of the most used languages. Not only C is very much used, it's still the only option in many cases and it is by far, the language that is most used to implement other languages, or at least to bootstrap them.
Considering the age of the paintbrush comparing to, say, spray ink, your analogy is in fact, not only valid, but a very good one.
No, it isn't. Da Vinci used a paintbrush to paint. Steve Jobs did not use C to program, because he never wrote any code or even designed anything according to at least one verifiable source[1].
It's more like saying the paintbrush is more important than anything some really successful art dealer ever did.
Both Jobs and Ritchie were important men. I don't know what you think you are going to accomplish here. Your posts are about neither of them, they are all about you.
Merging of tech, fashion / hiring the "best" for design, etc.
Branching out from engineering vs design (where so many say "I'm a coder, not a designer" and, making the point, that sometimes, you should invest (even by hiring), into "design."
I dunno, seems relevant to building applications for layman.
